


the penitential of fionán

by ceeturnalia (traveller)



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 20:30:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5640922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/ceeturnalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>It is the warm season when he comes, and the day cycles are long; the sun is still high when he at last emerges from the cave. The air is so bright and clear that he feels blinded, the quiet after the roaring song of the cave so sudden that he feels deafened. So robbed of his mortal senses, he opens himself to the one thing of which he is sure; he shoulders his pack and begins the long climb, hand over hand, to the temple.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the penitential of fionán

_If any cleric commits murder, he must become an exile for ten years and do penance seven years in another region... Having thus completed the ten years... if he has done well he shall be received into his own country... and he shall render to [the] father or mother, if they are still in the flesh, compensation for the filial piety and obedience [of the murdered man] and say: “Lo, I will do for you whatever you ask, in the place of your son.” But if he has not done enough he shall not be received back forever._

—St. Fionán of Cluain Eraird

 

The first thing he does is figure out how to hide his ship. There are some sea caves at the base of the island, the biggest one just barely a fit. There's a shelf of rock that's not quite wide enough for the ship to sit fully on, so he secures it with cables to the cave wall, and decides it will have to do. He's not sure about the water, if it will rise high enough to do damage. He studies the tide lines in the wavering blue light, the waves crashing and echoing against the rock, the wind moaning over the mouth of the cave, until it seems that the walls are moving with the water, the space expanding and contracting like a chamber of a massive stone heart.

It is the warm season when he comes, and the day cycles are long; the sun is still high when he at last emerges from the cave. The air is so bright and clear that he feels blinded, the quiet after the roaring song of the cave so sudden that he feels deafened. So robbed of his mortal senses, he opens himself to the one thing of which he is sure; he shoulders his pack and begins the long climb, hand over hand, to the temple. 

The next day he will find the stairs, and the landing at the foot of the mountain. The next day, he resolves, he will learn to fish. 

 

The Force is so strong in the temple that in the beginning, he can only bear to be inside a few minutes at a time. He will sit on the stone floor, settle into a hollow worn by centuries of other bodies before his. He will breathe in, and he will be lost. 

The first time he woke outside on the grass, choking up bile, his fingers dug into the soil. This is what drowning had felt like, that day on the Death Star, when he'd been pulled underneath the rancid, oily water. This is what drowning would feel like if the water was clean and cold, and the sea was screaming in his ears to let go, let go, breathe in. 

He breathes in. A little more each day, the ocean of the universe filling his lungs and his ears and his mouth. He had found his sister's grief suffocating when they had only a planet between them; millions of light years separate them now, but in the temple he feels her guilt and sorrow as if her hand was in his. A little more each day, until enough days pass that he can simply sink into it, until he is a stone instead of a struggling body, slipping below the surface without a splash, down and further down, eternally down. 

 

There are no trees on the island, only some scrubby bushes tucked in a fold in the landscape, out of the scouring wind. They produce a fragrant, tarry pitch that burns well but too quickly for light or warmth. The driftwood that sometimes catches in his fishing nets will do for a little warmth at night, but it won't be enough when the cold season comes. It isn't enough, when the first storms howl around the island, and he huddles in his robes against the rock wall of his hut. It's not the breath-stealing cold of Hoth, where with each second you didn't move, you could feel yourself dying; it's not the cold of night on Tatooine, which was more than anything else the simple absence of warmth, a void instead of a presence. It's wet and it's bitter and makes every bone in his body ache, even the fingers he no longer has. Salt crusts his beard as the wind whips seawater into his face when he climbs down to the landing to check his nets, and it seems even the fish have fled. He survives only by marshaling out the last of the rations from his pack, and on the first warm day of the rainy season, he falls to his knees in the mud and blesses every sunlit drop. 

 

How strong must the ancient Jedi been, he thinks, to choose this place. How much wisdom they must have had, he thinks, but they do not speak to him. His father, his old masters, do not speak to him. Of the millions of voices that murmur to him, that are carried to him in the cries of the birds, the barks of the sea-dogs, and the whispers of the grass, he recognizes only a few. That is one of the hardest tests of the island, he finds. The physical isolation wouldn't matter if there were just one mind he could safely touch, if he could respond to just one of the voices he receives. 

In the temple he sees endless, rolling sand dunes, feels the scorching heat on his skin. He sees thick green forest, feels the humid kiss of the heavy air. He sees the black expanse of space, broken only by distant pinpricks of light, and a cold pale moon, cast in shadow. 

 

Near the end of the first rainy season the ragged hull of a small boat drifts within sight as he works gutting fish on the landing. He draws it to him without a second thought, raising it up from the water and bringing it to rest on the stone. He knows nothing of the kinds of ships that fly in water, but he knows enough about the other kinds to figure out how to fix it. He patches the boat with pitch and scraps of canvas, making it as seaworthy as possible, but having no sail or oars, uses the Force to skim the waves to the big island in the distance. 

The people of the island are small and dark, and their dialect is as strange to him as Basic seems to be to them. They puzzle each other out, after a while, coming up with a serviceable pidgin that allows them to do business. When he tries to trade fish they laugh and point to their own boats and nets, so he trades the work of his hands instead, laboring on their boats and in their byres for the warm cloth and sturdy thread they make from the fur of their animals. He works for knowledge, too: how to dry the sea-weeds and keep them in bales for fuel in the cold season, how to collect salt and use it to preserve his fish. He learns from a farmer's wife how to make dense biscuits from their local grain, and how to cook them on an iron plate in the fire. He labors with them for a moon cycle before returning to his island, before the pull of the temple is too great, before the guilt at leaving his exile overcomes him. 

He returns once a season, after that. He trades work for supplies, learns more of their words. They ask about his gloved hand and he shows the scar above his wrist; it's enough that they press no more questions. They know he came from far away (he points toward the rising sun; they take it to mean he is from another of this planet's lands) and that he lives alone on the holy island, but they don't know the word Jedi. They call him by the name that they call their priests. They point to his hair, turned gold and silver by sun and salt water and time, and call him the Fair One. 

 

The Dark is growing stronger. He hears his sister curse his name, hears her damn him for his selfishness, for leaving her to fight alone. He prefers her anger, even as he knows that it's dangerous. Her anger makes what he has to do easier. He knows what his masters would say about the easy path. Maybe the Dark is reaching him, too, even here. 

 

Cycles come, seasons go. He learns to swim in the frigid waters around the island, paddling with the sea-dogs, who accept him as a misshapen brother. He eats salted fish and dry bread and green sea-weeds, and can run up the pilgrim's path from the landing without ever losing his breath. He can sit in the temple for days, coming so close to perfect oneness with the Force, so close that it's all the more jarring when he hears that discordant note, that jagged, ugly sound that rips into his head and his heart when his mind touches the thing that used to be his nephew. 

He tries to call it back to life, tries to coax it into the Light, but he fails. He reaches and he pulls, all his guilt and grief burning white hot through his veins, only to be denied, again and again. Every denial feels like the death of the Light, like Ben's fall, again, and again. 

The Force is everywhere, in the temple, in the island, in the cold sea and the warm earth. It is in all the vast reaches of the universe, from the smallest barren hurtling rock to the richest planet, fat with life. And all creatures are of the Force, and all creatures can be cruel—is the lesson that he should accept this? That he should absolve himself of his hand in that death, and all the deaths it has begotten? 

How can that be the lesson? He has abandoned all that was most precious to him. He has labored and starved and frozen, here at the end of the universe, to repay into the Force what his carelessness killed. The balance has not yet been struck. It cannot be the lesson: to forgive. 

To forgive would be too easy. 

 

In the temple he sees the burning sands. He sees the swirl of hyperspace, the expanse of the forest, the chill stone passage. He hears blaster fire, screams, the roar of ships' engines. He hears his masters' voices at last, so longed for, and they are not speaking to him. 

 

He watches the ship skim the water, banking around the island before coming to rest on the landing. He thinks of his nets. The fish will dive deep, away from the agitation; the catch will be small tonight. Will he even be on this planet, tonight? He watches her climb the stairs, following the pilgrim's path without misstep. He knows what she's carrying, can feel it as though it were still in his hand, as though he still had that hand, warm around the hilt. 

He closes his eyes as she travels the last of the path, feeling the Force flooding through him, rising around him. He feels her stop behind him, feels the rush of recognition, breaking over his senses. 

To forgive would be too easy. To be forgiven is so much harder. 

He turns around.


End file.
